It is not well known that many colors we take for granted had no name for along time, and had no names in the central texts in Western culture. AncientMediterranean texts, both Greek and Semitic, also had a reduced vocabulary of asmall number of colors polarized around the dark and the light—Homer and hiscontemporaries were limited to about three or four main colors: black, white, andsome indeterminate part of the rainbow, often subsumed as red, or yellow.